Smart electricity meters allow capturing consumption load profiles of residential buildings. Besides several other applications, the retrieved data renders it possible to reveal household characteristics including the number of persons per apartment, age of the dwelling, etc., which helps to develop targeted energy conservation services. The goal of this chapter is to develop further related methods of smart meter data analytics that infer such household characteristics using weekly load curves. The contribution of this chapter to the state of the art is threefold. The authors first quadruplicate the number of defined features that describe electricity load curves to preserve relevant structures for classification. Then, they suggest feature filtering techniques to reduce the dimension of the input to a set of a few significant ones. Finally, the authors redefine class labels for some properties. As a result, the classification accuracy is elevated up to 82%, while the runtime complexity is significantly reduced.

This handbook article applies an intuitive and informal principal-agent perspective as an organizing framework to provide a comparative description of executive-legislative relations in Europe with a focus on the member states of the European Union.